The Day They Threatened to Fire Me

In 2016, I sat in an auditorium in Las Vegas and watched my entire worldview change in a single afternoon.

I was at CES, the big electronics show, and a man on stage was explaining a technology I’d been hearing about for a couple of years but had never truly understood.

Bitcoin. A digital currency with a fixed supply, no central authority, and extremely difficult to confiscate.

A bomb went off in my mind at that moment. I knew I was looking at one of the most important monetary technologies ever built. And I knew it was going to change the life of anyone who bought it.

So I did something that, at the time, looked insane.

I changed my travel plans and flew straight back to Florida to see my publisher. I sat down in a conference room… three partners on one side of the table, me on the other.

I told them I’d seen the future. I told them we needed to start writing about this thing called bitcoin immediately.

I must have looked like a wild-eyed lunatic. You know what they told me?

“If you write about bitcoin, we’ll fire you.”

You know what I said?

“I don’t care. Fire me and I’ll start my own newsletter.”

They backed down, and the rest is history. I ended up recommending bitcoin when it was trading for $400-and-change. Today, even after every brutal crash, wipeout, and crypto winter, it’s up 13,852% from that price.

Right Now, It Feels Terrible